Facebook COO Sheryl
Sandberg learned the difference between skill and experience
requirements when it came to hiring.Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images

Before she joined Google in 2001, Sheryl Sandberg had
no experience in tech.

In a job interview at eBay, then-CEO Meg Whitman told
Sandberg it's important to hire for skills, not specific
experience.

Sandberg evolved this approach as the COO of
Facebook.

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg as his
COO in 2008, he was poaching top talent from Google.

Before Sandberg helped build Google's AdWords and AdSense
platforms into essential pillars of the company's empire, she was
the chief of staff to the US secretary of the Treasury — an
impressive position, but one that had nothing to do with tech.

When she left politics in 2000, she decided to move to Silicon
Valley and find a job. It was a meeting with Meg Whitman, who is
now the CEO of HP and was CEO of eBay at the time, that taught
her an important hiring lesson she would take to Google and then
Facebook.

After a series of interviews that ended with the interviewer
telling her she didn't have the necessary experience, Sandberg
decided to take a different approach. She remembered telling
Whitman, "I don't have any relevant experience. I'm going to
acknowledge that. But I'd still love to come work with you."

Whitman responded, according to Sandberg, "No one has any
experience, because no one's ever done this before. I want to
hire people with great skills. Hopefully you have great skills."

"I really took that lesson to heart," Sandberg said.

When she joined Google and was tasked with building a team that
would develop a large-scale ad platform, she decided that she was
not going to limit her candidate pool to those with digital
advertising or sales experience. Instead, she decided to focus on
skills.

Whitman explained that when she interviewed someone, she had them
describe learning moments in their career, and kept digging until
she could discern what she perceived to be that person's
strengths and weaknesses. She would then check those out with
referrals.

Whitman said that "pattern recognition is gained through
experience," but this doesn't contradict the lesson she taught
Sandberg several years before the Stanford presentation. When
Whitman interviewed Sandberg, she needed to know how Sandberg
approached her job in politics. Her experiences were important in
the sense that they either demonstrated management skills
required to be an executive at eBay or they didn't; her
experiences did not have to demonstrate that she had previously
held a job exactly like the one she was applying to.

Sandberg told Hoffman that she has paired the approach of
hiring for skills with Zuckerberg's
approach to hiring: "You should never hire someone to work
for you unless you would work for them."

You can listen to the full episode of "Masters of Scale" wherever
you get podcasts, or find it below.